We come now to our last session in this
series on the nature of Reformed theology, and we've been looking at the acrostic
TULIP over the past few days, and we've made adjustments to the terms that are
incorporated in it. In our last session we looked at the concept of irresistible
grace, and I mentioned that I preferred the term effectual grace, and before I
leave that altogether I just want to add a little concluding unscientific postscript
to it by reading a brief entry from the "Westminster Confession of Faith, " which
is a historic doctrinal standard of Reformed theology dating back to 17th
Century England where we have this reference to the doctrine of effectual
calling. It reads as follows: "All those whom God has predestined unto life, and
those only, He is pleased in His appointed and accepted time effectually to call by
His word and Spirit out of that state of sin and death, in which they are by
nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ enlightening their minds
spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God taking away their heart of
stone and giving unto them a heart of flesh, renewing their wills, and by His
almighty power determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing
them to Jesus Christ, yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by His
grace. " Now, I make this reference once again to the efficacy of the grace of
regeneration not to continue holdover from our last session, but as a bridge, a
transition to the final point of the acrostic TULIP, which brings us to the P
in TULIP, and now I'm sure you'll be delighted to know I'm not going to change
this letter. And the letter stands for the perseverance of the saints. However, even
though I'm not changing the letter, I'm going to make a change in the word. I also
think that that little catch phrase, perseverance of the saints, is dangerously
misleading, because again it suggests that the persevering is something that we do,
perhaps in and of ourselves. Now, I believe, of course, that saints do
persevere in faith and that those who have been effectually called by God and have
been reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit endure to the end, so that they do
persevere. But they persevere not simply because they are so diligent in their
making use of the mercies of God, but the only reason we can give why any of us
continues on in the faith even till the last day is not because we have persevered
so much as that is because we have been preserved. And so I prefer the term the
preservation--the preservation--of the saints, because this process by which we
are kept in a state of grace is something that is accomplished by God. Now we read
this statement from the Confession about God's effectively calling us to faith that
regeneration we call the divine initiative, and it refers to the first
step in our transformation. Just as we enter into this world through the process
of biological birth, rebirth does not refer to the whole of the new Christian
life, but rebirth refers to the beginning of it, the very first step, the step that
is accomplished by God's initiative when He quickens our souls from spiritual death
to spiritual life. And so we call this divine initiative the beginning point. And
it's the beginning that is performed, again as I say, by God. Now what does Paul write to the
Philippians? He says that "He who has begun a good work in you will perfect it
to the end. " Therein is the promise of God that what God starts in our souls He
intends to finish. And so the old axiom in Reformed theology about the perseverance
of the saints is this: If you have it, that is if you have genuine faith and are
in a state of saving grace, if you have it, you will never lose it. And if you
lose it, you never had it. Now we know that there are many, many people who make
professions of faith who then turn away and repudiate or recant their profession
of faith. As John writes in the New Testament there were those who left the
company of the disciples, and John says of them, "Those who went out from us were
never really with us. " Now they were with them in terms of outward appearances
before they departed, before they left the cadre of Jesus disciples. They had made an
outward profession of faith, and Jesus makes it clear that that's possible to do
even when you don't possess what it is you're professing. Remember Jesus says,
"This people honors Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. " And He
even warns at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that at the last day of judgment
many will come to Him saying, Lord, Lord, didn't we do this in your name? Didn't we
do that in your name? And He will send them away saying, "Depart from Me, you
workers of iniquity. I never knew you;" not that I knew you for a season and then
you went sour and betrayed me. No, no, you never were part of my invisible body of
the invisible church. The same kind of comments are made by Christ with respect
to Judas, who is called "The son of perdition from the beginning. " And in His
high priestly prayer Jesus prays that those whom the Father had given Him will
never be lost, and that no one will ever snatch them out of His hand. And He thanks
the Father that all that the Father gave to Him came to Him, and not one of them
had been lost. And we could enumerate for the next several minutes a host of similar
passages in the New Testament where that assurance is stated by the apostles that
the people who are dwelling in Christ have a future, a future inheritance that has
been established from the foundation of the world and that some day we will hear
the Father say, "Come my beloved. Inherit the kingdom which has been prepared for
you from the foundation of the world. " But again the point I want to stress is
that this enduring in the faith is not something that rests upon our strength.
Even after we're regenerated we still lapse into sin, and not only into sin but
into serious sin. And we say that it is possible for a Christian to be engaged in
a very serious fall. And we talk about backsliding; we talk about moral lapses
and so on. I can't think of any sin, other than blasphemy against the Holy Spirit,
that a truly converted Christian is not capable of committing. We look for example
at the model of David in the Old Testament where David was surely a man after God's
own heart. He was certainly a regenerate man. He had the Spirit of God in Him. He
had a profound passionate love for the things of God, and yet this man not only
committed adultery but he also was involved in a conspiracy to have his
lover's husband killed in war, which was conspiracy really to murder. And that's serious, serious business. And
we see the serious level of repentance to which David was brought as a result of the
words of the prophet Nathan to him. But the point is that David fell, and he fell
seriously as the apostle warns us against having a puffed up view of our own
spiritual strength by which he says, "Let him who thinketh he stands take heed lest
he fall. " And we fall, and we fall away from grace, not that we fall out entirely,
but we do fall away into very serious activities, none more serious than that of
the apostle Peter who publicly with cursing, even after being forewarned,
rejected Jesus Christ, swearing that he never knew Him--a public betrayal of
Christ. He committed treason against His Lord. Do you remember that before that
occasion when he was being warned of this eventuality, you know, Peter said this
would never happen. He would never behave in such a manner. And do you remember the
warning of Jesus? "Simon, Simon, Satan would have you and sift you like wheat,
but I have prayed for you, so that when you turn strengthen the brothers. " Now,
he fell, but he returned. He was restored. And so his fall was for a season. And
that's why we say that true Christians can have radical and serious falls but never
total and final falls from grace. Even in the church when people profess faith and
become involved in very serious and egregious sin, sin so serious that they
are involved in church discipline. And even with the process of church discipline
that goes through several stages, the final stage of which is what?
Excommunication. And I think it is possible; I think we know that it is
possible for a person who is truly regenerate, a true Christian, to be so
caught up in sin that that person is called to the church, is involved in
discipline; they're suspended from the sacraments; they still don't repent all
the way to the end of the list, which is excommunication where they are shut off
from the fellowship of the body of Christ and are to be treated as unbelievers, to
be declared as unbelievers by the church. Even that act of excommunication is done
with the hope that the person is a true believer who is now engaged in a very
persistent state of sin and that this final discipline of being cut off from
fellowship in the body of Christ will be that which the Spirit of God uses to bring
them to repentance. And we see that example found in the New Testament in the
Corinthian situation with the incestuous man. You recall how the church was doing
nothing about disciplining this man who was living a scandalous life until the
apostle had to rebuke them and admonish them and command them to excommunicate
him. What happened when he was excommunicated? He repented. And he
applies for readmission to the church, and now the church won't let him back. And so
Paul had to go back again and say now look, the whole purpose of that
excommunication was to provoke him to repentance. Now that he's repented, let
him back, even as Christ welcomed Peter back into the fold after his treacherous
act of treason. So again, the sin of the Christian can be radical and serious, but
never total and final. So how do we judge people who have made a profession of
faith, in our presence perhaps, and then we've seen them later repudiate it. Well,
the first thing you do is you make a judgment of charity, because you don't
know the real state of their souls. That's the one disadvantage we have. I can't read
anybody's heart. You can't read my heart, and I can't read your heart. We're called
to be discerning and wise and look at each other's actions and evaluate and discern
accordingly. But even by the best of your actions I
don't know what your soul is, and you can't know what is in my soul. And so we
are called to be exceptionally forbearing with one another and to have that charity
that covers a multitude of sins among ourselves in the fellowship of the church.
But God does read the heart. And when God says that a certain person never was in a
true state of faith, we can rest assured that that person never was in a true state
of faith. Now but what about if we happen to encounter somebody who is in the midst
of a serious, protracted fall where they have repudiated the faith publicly? Can we
then know that they're not Christians? No, because we don't know tomorrow. We don't
know if they're still what David was before Nathan came to him. If anybody
would have been by that bonfire when Peter says I never knew the Man, they certainly
wouldn't have made the judgment that Peter was a Christian, because they were
catching him while he was in the midst of this serious protracted fall. But we can
still hope with people who have left us that it's temporary, and that they'll be
back. And we just have to acknowledge that one of two things can be the case. One,
either their initial profession was not authentic and not genuine; it was an empty
profession of faith, and that they never were believers. Or that their faith
profession was genuine and they'll be back. But we leave that to God at this
point. But what the New Testament teaches us is that it is the Holy Spirit, again,
who alone raises us from the dead. And He raises us unto eternal life. The whole
purpose of God's election is to bring His people safely to heaven, so that what He
starts He promises to finish. And He not only just initiates the Christian life,
but the Holy Spirit as the sanctifier, the convictor, and the helper is there to help
in our preservation. Now two important terms are told with respect to the work of
the Spirit in the Christian's life that are related to this idea of the
preservation. The one is that we're sealed by the Holy Spirit, and the second is we
are given the earnest of the Spirit. Let's take the second one first. The term
earnest of the Spirit is drawn from the commercial language of Biblical days, and
the only thing I can think of that's a parallel in our own day would be what we
call earnest money when somebody is going to purchase a home that when you make the
initial contract you give a little bit of money as pin money or as a down payment,
which is a promise that you intend to get your loan and close the deal and pay the
rest of the balance due. And to show that you're in earnest you give this down
payment. Now I know that there are people who have paid earnest money who fail to
follow through. Maybe they weren't earnest in the first place, or maybe circumstances
came along that made it impossible for them to go the rest of the way. But
beloved, when God the Holy Spirit is given to you by the Father as an earnest, when
the Spirit Himself who is indwelling you is the Father's earnest for your future,
do you really doubt that the Father is going to fail to bring the final payment?
We possess not a handful of dollars but the indwelling Holy Spirit of God Himself
as God's promise to finish the job. And not only does He give us the earnest of
the Spirit, but He seals us in the Holy Ghost. When God writes our names in the
Lamb's book of life, He doesn't do it with an eraser handy, but He does it for
eternity, and that He seals us in the Beloved for all time. Now, finally, one of
the reasons why we have confidence in our future is not only because of the ministry
of the Holy Ghost that I've just mentioned quickly in passing but most importantly
because of the ongoing work of Jesus. Somehow we have a tendency or sometimes, I
think, we have the tendency to think that when Jesus came and lived His life of
perfect obedience and fulfilled all of the demands of the law that we have failed to
fulfill and then by His passive obedience paid the price for our sins with His
perfect atonement that He's done everything that we ever need Him to do for
us, but we forget that when He ascended into heaven and was seated at the right
hand of God and enthroned as the King of kings and the Lord of lords, He was not
just going for His royal realm, but He also entered into heaven as our great High
Priest. And the chief function of our High Priest,
as he tells us, is to intercede for us daily for the Father. Jesus prays for me,
for my ultimate salvation. Not only did He pray for His disciples in John 17 that
they would never be snatched out of God's hand, but He prays for us that we would be
preserved. Now again, look at Judas and Peter. Both betrayed Christ. One was a
believer; the other one wasn't. Both of their actions were repugnant in the
extreme--total betrayal of Christ. Both were predicted by Christ. And when He told
Judas what he would do, he ended those comments by saying to Judas, "What you
have to do, do quickly. " And He dismissed him. But when He made the same type of
prediction about the behavior of Peter, as we've already mentioned, "Satan would have
you and sift you like wheat, " and so on, do you remember what He said? But Simon, I
have prayed for you so that when you turned, not if you turn, so that when you
turn, strengthen the brothers. My confidence in my preservation is not in my
ability to persevere, but my confidence rests in the power of Christ to sustain me
with His grace and by the power of His intercession for us that He is going to
bring us safely through.
